


Zugzwang

by protectginozasquad



Category: Criminal Minds, Psycho-Pass
Genre: F/M, FBI AU, Suicide, criminal minds au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-12
Updated: 2015-11-12
Packaged: 2018-05-01 07:30:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5197499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/protectginozasquad/pseuds/protectginozasquad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ginoza is about to see the woman he loves for the very first time. But there’s a gun pushed against his back, a deranged woman whispering in his ear, and he has no idea how they are going to make it out alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Zugzwang

**Author's Note:**

> This is long and involved and probably confusing and not very good. But I want to be rid of it, and I'm sorry. Ginoza is a genius FBI agent. Will this war never end?

Ginoza smiles into the payphone, glad his blush is hidden. 

“What? What’s so funny?” 

Ginoza’s eyes widen. “I didn’t laugh. Can you hear my body language?” 

A giggle from the other end of the line. “I can hear you smile. Spit it out, what’s so funny?” 

Ginoza laughs out loud this time. Of course she would know that he's smiling. She understands him so well, even from the other side of a phone. 

“I think it’s funny that we’ve been doing this for six months, and I still don’t even know what you look like. I mean, all you have to do is one google search for the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit and you get my picture. I’ve cut my bangs since, then, by the way-” 

“I don’t know what you look like either, Ginoza,” the melodic voice floats through the harsh plastic of the payphone. 

“R-really?” He’s still shy. He always has been. 

“Yes, really,” she sighs.

“Akane, I want us to meet. Soon." He pauses, this is a sensitive subject. But he has to try to convince her. "My team, we are the best, you know. I’m sure we could help-” 

“No.” Her tone, kind, loving, but firm, leaves no room for argument. 

“Why?” He knows he must sound pathetic, pleading. 

“Because I don’t want to put you in danger. We’ve been on the phone for too long. I’ll talk to you next Sunday.” 

+++

_Two Weeks Later_

The case has gotten complicated. It isn’t often that the behavioral analysis unit of the FBI is completely stumped, but here they sit, in a New Mexico police station, case information scribbled everywhere, with no suspects. 

“Maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way,” Kougami is the first to speak. They’ve been sitting in silence, each staring at their respective folders, for an hour. 

“What do you mean, Kou?” Masaoka looks up at the unit chief. 

There has been a string of abductions in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The first inkling the Albuquerque police department had of the abductions was a strange 911 call, a man claiming to have woken up in a motel room, disoriented and, as he talked on the phone, he realized one of his legs had been amputated below the knee. 

Since then, six people have gone missing, and only the second one had turned up alive. The third and forth had shown up together, on the outskirts of town, their legs disgustingly amputated and re-sown, one onto the other’s. 

“We’ve been going by strict pathology, but we keep dead-ending.” 

“Well,” Yayoi speaks up. “Clearly this guy is interest in amputations. And the victimology has gotten more consistent since the first two.” 

“I don’t think,” something dawns on Ginoza, everyone turns to look at him. “It’s the amputation that he’s interested in. The sewing back together has been the fixation.” 

“Then what did he need the first two victims for?” Masaoka asks. 

Ginoza words go quickly, the way they always do when he’s thinking too fast. “He really didn’t seem to know what he was doing. Maybe he was practicing. The rest of the surgeries have had a second component. He may have started with an amputations to make sure he could do that without killing the victim.” 

Their job is to build a profile, to hunt serial killers down through behavior. It’s not an exact science, and it doesn’t always work, but it gets pretty damn close most of the time. 

Ginoza is a young profiler with doctorates in biochemistry, philosophy, and criminology. His father is a detective, also employed by the BAU. Raised only by his dad - his mother had been institutionalized, paranoid schizophrenia, since he was nine - Ginoza never learned how to do anything else. It doesn’t hurt that the unit chief of the BAU is his academy roommate. He doesn’t have a problem deferring to the rough orders of his best friend. Most of the time, he’s happy to give his say and do what he’s told. 

Ginoza’s most valuable asset is his eidetic memory. While it makes him invaluable to the team, it also makes for overcrowded thoughts and an idiosyncratic personality. His father always says he takes after his mother. Ginoza hopes, secretly, that he doesn’t take after her quite enough, so he stays on the visiting side of the psychiatric hospital. 

+++

Another night, another victim: a woman, late thirties, with her own right leg amputated and another’s sewn in place. Ginoza’s overactive brain whirrs into gear, and as he stares at the crime scene, he suddenly realizes that Kougami is right. They are looking at this wrong, but none of them are qualified to look at it the right way. He pulls out his phone and dials their analyst back in Quantico.

“Shion, I need to know where the nearest payphone booth is.” 

“You have a cell phone, Ginoza. I know you don’t like technology, but stop being such an old man. Even your dad is better at using it than you are.” 

“Shion... please?” 

Ginoza hears a sigh from the other end of the line.

“Suit yourself, mystery kid.” He hears typing and then: “There’s one ten blocks west and two blocks north. 

“Thanks,” Ginoza mutters quickly before hanging up. 

He flags down the member of the team he trusts most. “Risa- hey Risa!” 

She looks at him, concerned, while she finishes her conversation with Kougami on the phone. “Yeah, the body was dumped in a hurry. Which means he must still have the second girl he’s abducted. We’ll meet you back at the police station.” 

She puts her phone away and looks up at Ginoza. “What is it?” 

Ginoza takes a deep breath, before spilling words out his mouth. “While we head to the police station, can we make a detour? I need to get a... a consultation.” 

She stares at him, mystified, before nodding. They take one of the big FBI suburbans. 

“So, where exactly are you getting this consultation? In Albuquerque in the middle of the night?” 

“There’s a payphone just up ahead, you can drop me off, I’ll call a cab.”

“A payphone? Don’t be ridiculous, I’m not leaving you in the dark by a payphone all alone with a serial killer on the loose.” 

“You know he isn’t around here, and he isn’t looking for someone like me.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m not leaving you here.” 

Ginoza hops out of the car, rolling his eyes at Risa’s stubbornness. It’s eerie, a streetlight flickering above it. He jams change in, looks up to find Risa’s eye trained on him, as she steps out of the suburban herself. He listens to the phone ring twice before hanging up.

“What’s going on?” She demands. He doesn’t know what to say, so he shrugs. 

“And the bigger question is,” the indignant FBI agent adds, “Why did you ask me to bring you here? Why not Kougami? Or your dad?” 

“Okay listen,” Ginoza relents. “About a year ago, I was having those terrible headaches, remember?” 

Risa nods slowly. 

“I contacted a geneticist who specializes in brain activity of those with schizophrenia in their families who aren’t schizophrenic themselves. She’s a neurobiology researcher. She helped me.” 

“She?” 

The phone starts to ring. 

“Can we talk about this later?” Ginoza pleads. It’s not that he doesn’t want to tell Risa, he just doesn’t want her to worry.

Risa sighs and gets back in the car, engine running and headlights on.

Ginoza picks the phone up quickly. “I’m here, sorry.” 

“Ginoza? Why are you calling? It’s not Sunday.” 

“I know.” 

“Is something wrong? You’re breathing really heavily.” 

“The case we’re working on... I need a second opinion.” 

The words tumble out, and, despite his focus on catching the killer, Ginoza can’t help but love the way her soft voice betrays her quick mind and clever spirit.

“Maybe he isn’t handicapped himself, but his loved one, a wife or child is.” 

“What he's done with the victims sound like botched experiments,” her voice trickles through thoughtfully. 

“Yeah, so the question is: what, and who, is he trying to fix?” 

“The last three have all been women, and the coroner's report said A-positive, right?” 

“Yeah, that's right." 

“Based on the age and blood type of the victims, my guess is either an older daughter or his wife, probably.” 

“Daughter or wife...” the thoughts spin quickly through Ginoza’s head. His spotless memory flips through the pages of case files, “Since he’s amputating only legs, he’s obviously looking to fix some sort of handicapped leg. What causes birth deformities in legs?” 

“Fetal alcohol syndrome is the first thing that comes to mind.” 

“Is there anything else?” That doesn’t sound right. The killer is hellbent on a cure, not vindictive against a reckless drinker.

“Hold on, Gino,” it is the first time she’s used a nickname, and Ginoza’s breath hitches while he listens to paper rustling. “Yes, it’s like I thought. Chicken pox in a mother can also cause deformities of the extremities in newborns. But effective treatment was discovered in the last twenty years, which means it can’t be-”

“An older daughter, it would need to be a wife.” 

“Exactly.” 

“Thank you. You’re amazing.” 

The way she breathes tells him that she’s smiling. 

“Go get him.” 

+++

Shion works quickly, identifying women in the area with recorded leg deformities due to chicken pox during the pregnancies of their mothers. 

“How on earth did you figure this one out? I know you’re a genius and all, but come on.” Shion’s sultry voice comes through the phone on speaker. The rest of the team, all of whom were clearly also curious, eye him suspiciously. 

“I got a,” he stops, awkward. “Consult.” 

“One hell of a consult in the middle of the night,” Kougami mutters. 

“Here!” An exclamation comes from the phone. Ginoza is grateful that Shion’s outburst distracts everyone from him. She gives them a name and an address, and they all rush to the house.

A frantic man, screaming about ‘fixing her,’ is dragged from his garage, and the abductee, still alive, is rushed to the hospital. She will never be able to walk again, but she is saved. As they search the rest of the house, they wake a startled woman, in her late fifties, reaching for her prosthetic as Kougami and Masaoka calmly explain what her husband has been doing in the garage for the last two months. 

She collapses in Kougami’s arms, says she feels sick, she never wanted him to fix her. Ginoza walks into the room, looks at Kougami with sad eyes. They take her with them to the police station, and in the morning, they are on their way back to Virginia. 

+++

The next Sunday, Ginoza goes on his weekly outing to a suburb of Quantico, in search of a new phone booth. He finds one near a nice park, so he can imagine that they are walking through it while they talk. He plops his change in, hears the phone ring twice, and hangs up. 

Normally Akane calls back in the next thirty seconds, so his heart speeds up once it gets past a minute. He considers calling again, when it finally rings, startling him.

“Akane, I was wor-”

“Hello agent.” A garbled voice, harsh, robotic, nothing like Akane’s melodic one, streams through the phone with dramatic force. Ginoza knows he should say something, but he’s too shocked to do anything. 

“It seems you finally made a mistake. I hope that consultation was worth it. This isn’t quite checkmate, but it is zugzwang.” 

The line goes dead.

Ginoza stares at the phone in his limp hand. He stands, paralyzed for a moment, before he frantically begins rummaging through his jacket pockets. Once he gets to his phone, it takes him a few tries to pull up Kougami’s information, and he dials it quickly. 

“Kougami,” he says, breathless. 

“Ginoza, what’s wrong?” 

“I know it’s a lot to ask, b-but,” Ginoza can feel himself shaking. “The team, I need you to get them together.” 

“What’s going on?” 

“I’m n-not sure, b-but it isn’t good. Kougami, I need them.” 

“Everyone will be here in an hour. Can you explain?” 

“I will.” 

+++

“She’s been stalked for the last ten months. Threatening letters, phone calls, so she stays inside her house. She even gets her groceries delivered. She didn’t want him to find out about me, so we only talked once a week. I never called her from the same phone booth twice.” 

“What’s her name?” Shion has her laptop out and ready.

“Tsunemori Akane. She’s a geneticist. I know she lives here in Quantico. She’s mentioned seeing my office, back when she could,” he swallows, “actually leave the house.” 

“How do you know she’s missing?” Kougami asks gently.

“When I called her today, it’s Sunday, the only day of the week we talk,” his breathing is shallow. “I called her number, and when the payphone was called back, there was this disguised voice.” 

“What did he say?” 

“He said I made a mistake, and that this is zugzwang.” 

“Zugzwang?” 

“It’s a chess term,” Ginoza’s voice grows very small. “A situation a player finds themselves in, where they will inevitably be checkmated. They have to choose whether to surrender, or play the game out to the end.” 

Kougami looks around at the rest of the team, Risa, Masaoka, Yayoi, and Shion. “There aren’t any departments to invite us in on this, so we’ll be working on personal time. Does anyone have any problems with that?” 

Everyone shakes their heads silently. 

“Good. Let’s get to work.” 

+++

“You still don’t remember me?” 

“No,” Akane says tiredly. She’s bound to a chair in a bare, unfurnished room on the third floor of a dingy apartment building. 

“Think harder, _doctor._ ” The barrel of a gun sweeps Akane’s bangs to the side of her face. She looks up at her captor, a petite, brown-haired young woman, with burning brown eyes and sunken cheeks. She looks like she could be very beautiful.

“I don’t remember you.” 

“Seriously? Maybe remembering someone like me is below your pay grade, but you're supposed to be some genius.” 

It dawns on Akane, when she takes in the young age, obsessive nature, the references to herself as ‘doctor,’ she remembers.

“Wait... I read your thesis, didn’t I? Shimotsuki, right?”

“Finally!” The girl screams at her. “Mika Shimotsuki. You rejected me. Instead, you accepted an anxious, pill-popping crybaby.” 

“Do not,” Akane’s eyes grow hard. “Talk about Dr. Hinakawa that way. He an exceptional scientist. His work on antipsychotics has been ground-breaking for delusional disorders. If you’ve been keeping up on my office, you should know that.” 

“My research would have been groundbreaking, too.” 

“Your science was faulty,” Akane has started to remember. The work was unsound. She remembers feeling sorry for the author of the thesis. 

“You used your brother’s psychopathology as the foundation of your sample.” 

“Not my brother’s psychopathology! It wasn’t Tougane’s fault! It was our mother. She ruined him, it wasn’t fair. He didn’t have a chance. I included her behavior in the thesis, too.” 

“You used not only one biased sample, but two."

“There’s nothing wrong with using the samples at your disposal. If you had listened, we could have uncovered the cure for psychopathology.” 

“There isn’t a cure for psychopathology,” Akane spits. “I know you hate that you have these thoughts in your head, about hurting people, and animals, just like your older brother, and you thought, if I took you in, maybe, just maybe we could find a cure together.” 

Mika’s lip quivers as Akane speaks. It’s the first time she’s shown weakness, and Akane doesn’t back off.

“But you’re sick. You can’t get away from what you’ve done anymore. ” 

“I can take everything from you!” Mika shrieks. Akane winces. 

“No, you can’t.” 

“I’ll even take your precious agent Ginoza from you.” 

“No, you won’t.” She says it with firmness. Truthfully, she can’t see how Ginoza will get her out of it, but she knows for certain that he will come. 

“We’ll see about that,” Mika’s voice is harsh, determined. 

+++

Shion rushes into the conference room as the conference phone starts to ring. “Ginoza, you need to pick it up.” Ginoza doesn’t like it when Shion’s voice is that tense. 

Kougami answers her. “Who is it, Shion?” 

“I don’t know, but she says she has Tsunemori Akane.” 

“She?” 

“She wants to talk to Ginoza. I’ll work on tracking her position through the phone line.” 

Kougami steps forward, bars the trembling Ginoza from the phone. “She can talk to me first.” He reaches for the conference room phone as it rings. 

“This Supervisory Special Agent Kougami Shinya of the BAU. To whom am I speaking?” 

“I need to speak to agent Ginoza Nobuchika.” 

“Unfortunately, as unit chief you have to go through me first. Can we talk a bit?” 

“If you don’t put agent Ginoza on the phone in thirty seconds, he will never see Dr. Tsunemori again. Is that clear?” 

“All right,” Kougami changes to a passive tone. “Your rules. Give me a moment, and I'll get S.S.A. Ginoza.” 

He puts the phone on hold, setting it down before Ginoza can grab at it.

“Kou, you have to put me on-” 

“Gino,” Kougami takes him by both shoulders. “I will, but you need to keep your head. If you want to get her back, we’re going to have to play nice with whoever this is. Get her talking about Akane. Ask how she’s doing. See if she’ll agree to a meeting point.” 

“I know, I know, just give me the phone!” Ginoza’s voice is tight, he feels his lungs constricting. 

Kougami hands him the phone. 

“Hello?” 

“Ah, agent,” a high-pitched, biting voice meets Ginoza’s ears. “It’s good to hear from you again. I have your woman here. She’s waiting for you to come rescue her. I told her you will indeed find us, because you're just that brilliant. Far too brilliant for someone like her.” 

“Could I talk to her?” Ginoza says, slowly, carefully, trying not to let his voice betray the panic raging through him. 

“I suppose, although I don't know why you're wasting your time with her.”

Ginoza hears rustling on the other end of the phone, and then the sound of shallow breath: “Gino?” 

“Akane. Are you okay?” 

“Yeah, she hasn’t hurt me. Gino, please don’t come, if you do she’s going to kill you-” 

The sentence is interrupted, and the haughty voice returns. “That’s quite enough of that. Has your analyst triangulated my location yet?” 

Ginoza looks up to a thumps-up from Shion. 

“Yes.” 

“We’ll be waiting.” 

The phone line drops off, and Ginoza looks towards Shion. 

"She called from an apartment building near the warehouse district. It's old, and only a few tenants have leases there. It should only take you twenty minutes to get there."

Ginoza looks around the room, focuses on Kougami. "What are we waiting for? Let's go!"

"Gino, what are we going to do when we get there? She's going to ask for just you, and we don't negotiate with hostage-takers.  
"Kou, we know this kind of narcissistic behavior and how it works."

"Yeah," Kougami's voice raises. "This ends with murder suicide or suicide by cop if we box her in. She's not going to let Akane go. You know that."

"No," the thoughts, merged with panic, race through Ginoza's brain like lightning. He has an idea. Just one, but it could work.

“This girl, whoever she is, thirsts for recognition, a recognition she believes that Akane has, but she doesn’t. You can hear it in her voice. I can give that to her. Then we can find an opening, one that doesn't end with anybody dead."

Kougami looks at him skeptically. “And just how are you going to do that?” 

With a knot forming at the pit of his stomach, Ginoza answers, “I’m going to tell her that I love her.” 

+++

On the drive over, they keep Shion on speaker. 

"I traced the cell phone to a Mika Shimotsuki. It appears that she was a graduate student who applied to work at the same pharmaceutical research facility that Akane was researching at."

Ginoza suddenly understood what this was about. "Akane is the one who reads the student theses to decide who gets to enter their program. I bet she read this girl's thesis and rejected her. I remember her saying she hired a young pharmacist name Sho."

"Yeah, it looks like after applying to the facility and being rejected, Mika fell off the map, tried and failed to hold down some low-level graduate assistant jobs."

"Shion, can you see what her thesis was on?"

"One minute," the agents all hear Shion's furious clicking, and then: "She asserted that psychopathology has been mistreated in years past, and neurobiology should be able to find a cure for it. It looks like her university refused to publish the thesis because her testing sample was unreliable."

"So she reached out to Akane, thinking that she could confirm the faulty logic and they could work together to fix, what is presumably her own, psychopathology."

The conversation comes to a close as they pull up to the apartment building. 

The building is large, run-down. The BAU is armed, suited with bulletproof vests, ready to go in. Ginoza and Kougami walk to the front of the complex, backed by Yayoi, Masaoka, and Risa. Ginoza, somehow, knows what he’s supposed to do. He pushes a buzzer to the apartment complex. The voice, high-pitched and biting, comes through the intercom. “Take your vest off and leave your gun behind.” 

“Gino,” Kougami says tentatively. “Don’t.” But Ginoza is already stripping his vest off, tossing his gun to Risa, the only one who isn’t gaping at him. The only one who seems to understand the he needs to do this.

“Nobuchika,” Masaoka begins. 

“No, dad,” Ginoza barks. “If I don’t go in there, she’s dead.” 

“But if you go in there, you’re dead,” Kougami’s tone is sharp, authoritative, but he doesn’t reach out to stop him.

Ginoza turns away from them, not angry, but terrified enough to fight anyone who gets in his way. He’s going to get her back, see her, hold her, kiss her. 

He has to.

The door opens, slightly, and the voice barks at him to get inside, shut the door behind him. He holds his hands in the air to show how he's unarmed, and slides through the door. Immediately he feels the metal of a gun through the back of his shirt, pressed into the small of his back.

"Welcome, agent."

He glances back to get a look at the source of the voice. Sharp, angry brown eyes burn into him.

She shoves him towards a staircase roughly. "Up. I'm Mika Shim-"

“Mika Shimotsuki, you don’t have to tell me your name, I’ve been anxious to meet you,” the words taste like bile on his tongue, but Ginoza gets them out. 

He aches to get to the end of the hallway, where he knows he will see the woman he loves for the very first time. But there’s a gun pushed against the small of his back, a deranged woman whispering in his ear, and he has no idea how either of them are going to make it out alive. 

He has to at least try.

“Oh really?” The younger girl’s tone is sarcastic, filled with rage. 

“Really,” he forces softness into his tone. 

She pushes him down the hallway, rough but clearly eager to listen to what he has to say. 

“I know what you've been studying, our analyst told me about your research on our way here, and I have to say, I think that you're right.” 

Mika stops suddenly, disbelieving, “Don’t lie to me.” 

“I’m not lying, Mika. I see psychopathology in my work with the BAU every day, and I can't help but think that if you're right, we will have a whole new way to take on cases. The possibilities for treating psychopathology have been under-researched."

Mika pushes him forward as they reach the top of the staircase, into a bare room. Ginoza's heart beat faster, because he was lying through his teeth as he prepares himself to look at the woman he loves for the first time.

And then he sees her. 

Hands bound behind her, hair askew, sweat running down her cheeks, by all accounts, she looks a terrified mess. And Ginoza's mind goes blank for a moment, because, for a moment, he knows she's the most beautiful woman he's ever seen, and he needs to save her. Never has he needed something more. 

So he forces words, words he hates himself for saying, out of his mouth, as Mika shoves him into a chair facing Akane. 

"If you know anything about me," his voice doesn't shake. "You'll know what I love is those who things in new ways. That’s the only reason I was interested in Dr. Tsunemori, but I see now, because she rejected you, she clearly can't understand the thoughts of people like you and me. There’s been someone better in front of me all this time. There’s no reason for me to love her anymore.” 

“I guess that means I don’t need her,” she takes the gun and walks briskly towards the handcuffed Akane.

“Kill her and she won’t have to live with the fact that you’re better, smarter,” Ginoza wants to choke, tries not to let it out too desperately. “More beautiful than she is. Make her live with her inferiority.” 

“Did you hear that, Dr. Tsunemori?” Mika’s eyes light up, venomous, as she turns back to Akane, whose face is tense, afraid but strong. Ginoza wants to melt, wants to cry, she’s better than he could have hoped for. She’s small, strong, with eyes that express a willingness to fight and a cleverness he can’t wait to unravel. He hopes, with everything in him, it all belongs to him.

“Your precious agent doesn’t love you. Isn’t that right, agent Ginoza? Look her in the eye and tell her.” 

So he does. He looks at Akane’s large, soft eyes, full of sincerity, fear, and warmth. 

“I don’t love you,” he says with all the conviction he can muster, promising himself with each word that he’ll tell her over and over again how much he does love her when this is over. 

“Tell her again, agent.” 

He almost chokes, as he looks at Akane, lost in how beautiful she is, in the most understated of ways. 

“I don’t love you,” he swallows the lump. It needs to sound sincere. “I’m sorry.” 

Akane, tiny tears gathering at the corners of her eyes, nods. “I understand.” 

“That’s nice, that’s very good,” Mika taps her hip with the butt of the revolver. “There’s just one more thing she really needs to see.” Mika walks in front of Ginoza, bends down to meet him at eye-level and kisses him. He wants to push her away, to run and gather Akane in his arms, but he doesn’t. He tries to kiss back, only parts his eyelids slightly to look in Akane's direction, to apologize with his eyes. 

But he isn’t the only one with an open eye. Mika squints at him, says, “Liar!” against his lips.

Ginoza finds his opening. He stands up from the chair and grabs the arms that hold the revolver, but Mika is scrappy, she wiggles out from under him and shoots. He suppresses a scream as it rips through his arm muscle, and looks up to find Mika’s arm wrapped around Akane, gun held to her temple. 

“You lied. About all of it.” 

Ginoza starts to talk, as fast as he can, whatever comes to mind. Everything is swimming in front of him. Terror eats away at him, gnawing him from the inside out. 

“There is still a way out of this, Mika. I can arrange for a deal to get you out of here.” 

“The federal government doesn’t make deals with people like me.” 

“That’s not true,” Ginoza tries to keep his heartbeat slowed, and focus his eyes on Mika, but Akane’s face scrunched up in a calm, muted fear distracts him. “Mafia leaders are often put into witness protection. Hackers are regularly recruited by the government to build more effective walls against terrorists. If what you have, if what you can do is valuable enough, the federal government will take you in.” 

The panicked girl, eyeliner smudged everywhere, chest heaving up and down, doesn’t pull the gun away from Akane’s forehead. 

“Or we could do a trade. Me for her.” 

“You would do that?” Tears stream down Mika’s face. 

“Yes,” Ginoza breathes, ignores Akane’s subtle head shake and her soft, “No, don’t-”

“You would kill yourself for her?” 

“Yes.” 

Mika removes the gun from Akane’s forehead, and Ginoza, for a split-second, feels a weight lift from his chest, until he watches Mika raise the gun to her own forehead, jerk Akane’s head back so their faces are level. 

“WAIT!” Ginoza screams, but his plea is drowned by the gunshot.

+++

The curse, or blessing, of the eidetic memory is that he remembers every single conversation, every word of every letter she wrote him. He doesn’t need to re-read them to remember. 

But he does read them, without really reading, only runs his eyes over the words, again and again, as if he can imagine her hand writing them to him, as if the imagined picture of her writing to him at her desk will erase the very real memory of her bleeding from her forehead, dead in the arms of her dead captor, on a dirty, empty floor. 

He never got to tell her that he loved her.

He sits on his hard wood floor, for weeks. Shion and Yayoi come by, leaving gift baskets, overflowing with food, supplements. Anything Shion can research to lift a grieving spirit, it gets left outside his door. He manages, barely, to feed Dime and take him out once a day. The husky’s mood is calmer than ever, as if he understands. Ginoza has always loved that about his dog. 

He reads Akane’s last letter again to him, when they had planned to meet once the stalking, eventually, would end. He runs his eyes over the beautiful cursive, even though he could repeat the words by heart. 

_"I hope we'll be meeting so soon. But it’s not really like we’re meeting, is it? It’s like we’ll be just where we’re supposed to be, with each other. It’s strange, but I already feel like I know what it’s like to hold your hand, hug you. It’s almost like I’ve done it so many times, but I can’t wait to do it again. I’ll see you very soon. Love, Akane."_


End file.
